God awful and dull

Rating: 1/10 (28 June 2003)

I'm a sucker for a good zombie-type film but I was cheated on this flick. Minor spoilers.
First off, this is not a zombie flick anymore than the Blair Witch Project was about the witch or Signs was about aliens. In all three cases the "monster" is used as a device to explore human problems (and in fairness Night of the Living Dead does the same thing). I like the latter three films becuase while they aren't just monster movies the monsters are sort of omnipiresent and you feel their influence constantly in the film. 28 Days Later doesn't do that. The "rage" infected (the zombies are vicitms of, shocker, a bioexperiment gone wrong and unleashed) are intermittently in the film and there are times you totally forget about them.
Second, the main conflict in the film arises sort of out of nowhere- I won't divulge what it is. It makes no sense what so ever and the "good" guy's solution to it is to kill all sorts of non-zombies by working with the "zombies". You might be able to rationalize some of the actions of the real bad guys but when you realize that society has been gone for all of 28 days at most it gets hard to accept that all societal norms could vanish so quickly- escpeially among folks not in the heat of the moment, spare me about riots and such things.
Third, Danny Boyle has the camera sense of the guy who filmed Battlefield Earth. Too many shots on tilts. His handling of action is outright abominable. He's not good with action so he resorts to the classic close shots, bad lighting and frequent cuts to obscure his failures. I don't know why folks still do this since the end result is that you can't see anything happening in the climax. That would assume you care since the zombies are killing bad guys anyway. In BWP, Signs and NotLD you are emotionally invested in the trapped would-be victims but in this flick you don't care a lick about the zombie show and might even be rooting for thier demise. Scarey it ain't.
Oh, BTW, one last little gripe at a key moment a British solider has his gun jam- and of course can not clear the jam. This is a really tired movie cliche and deux et machina effect but worse is that all soliders act like they've never been trained to clear a jam.